Fargo, ND --Bus Terminal -- August 4, 2007

Reading , edited by Norman Wirzba.

He’s on his way up to Winnipeg to work on a collective farm where they grow vegetables.

The book is about the philosophies of Wendell Berry, who wrote about farming issues and farmed with horses on a homestead in Kentucky. This book came out of Georgetown, they are expounding on his work.

New thoughts to him: One of the big challenges for aspiring farmers is to think about how farming can be done right in the long term. There has been and dismal decline and how it is done. What is needed is to do farming in a way that is not just a variation of of mining--taking from the land. But to do it otherwise is very labor intensive and makes the food expensive. So the push is always to lower prices or work at a loss.

Improvement? The idea of creating agrarian farm communities with a push to move suburbanite wanna bes out of the cities, sell them small plots with a share in larger commons that some people farm. It's about returning the farmland to a commonwealth. Farmers are custodians of land instead of just extracting things from it.